Slashdot Mirror
Gmail Cracks Down on Third-Party Notifiers
crtfdgk writes "Recently, Google's gmail service has attempted to change login protocols to block third-party gmail notifiers that alert you to new email. Google has now taken it one step further and created a word-identification script filter as part of the login process. Personally, I find Google's gmail notifier annoying since it sits in my taskbar and doesn't have popup notification, unlike many other worthy Firefox or Mozilla plugins that feature gmail notification. Shouldn't I be free to use whatever third party software to check my email? Will we be seeing controls on browsers that can view gmail next?"
Shouldn't I be free to use whatever third party software to check my email? Will we be seeing controls on browsers that can view gmail next?
My feeling is that if it's a *FREE* service (meaning you don't pay Google anything to use Gmail) then no, you shouldn't be free to use whatever third party software you choose.
Sorry but when you're not even a paying customer, I feel no love.
Who says Google is trying to stifle 3rd party apps? It is still beta, they are still fixing things, and nothing has been finalized. Instant Messenger services change their protocols occasionally but they don't block 3rd party apps.
Either way, if you've got a Gmail account, be sure to give them your two cents.
I've been trying to imagine why google would do such an un-google thing. Perhaps they're worried about coders going to next level, and coding up entire gmail readers--or incorporating gmail account readers into something like Thunderbird. Adding that word-identification script filter to the login process would certainly prevent something like that--but also has the side effect of blowing up the seemingly innocuous gmail email notifier.
Which leads me to wonder how google's own system tray email notification program can still work. Obviously it's still possible, in theory, to do this same thing in spite of the word-identification script filter. Perhaps google will publish an API that 3rd party developers can use solely for the use of gmail notification abilities in their own programs.
I can't believe (thought it's definitely possible) that their goal would be to blow up only the 3rd party email notification programs. It seems like 3rd party notification programs would serve to only promote the use of gmail. And, as far as I know, they gain no ad revenue directly from their gmail notification system tray icon.
They actually publish an API for doing (limited) google searches in 3rd party programs, which seems like a more overt way to avoid ads and avoid google's revenue source. Maybe that'll be history soon, who knows? I hope this isn't an indication of their new corporate policy and philosophy.
-- "A chicken is an egg's way of making another egg."
"Will we be seeing controls on browsers that can view gmail next?" Well, there already are restrictions in the way they have the site built. I can't use lynx (or links/elinks) or konqueror to access my GMail as it is.
Steal This Sig
I thought it might be because I had https:// bookmarked, but it's not on either site.
I notice no word verification... I like the google gmail notifier it does do pop ups. :) plus you can choose "tell me again" to see the pop up again if you missed it.
I suggest either running your own email server, or getting a decent imap account from your isp. Although webmail services may be convenient at times, you have to come to grips with the fact thats its a webmail service, so you're not going to get all the bells and whistles. Gmail is neato, but I don't think it's good enough for the power user.
Hi there
This is still a free beta email service. I can't believe I am reading a complaint about a beta service. You are there to fix bugs and offer suggestions.
/. commentary...
"Will we be seeing controls on browsers that can view gmail next?"
fuckin
Since when does it not have popup notification?
They have a right to do this. I like Google's services as much as the next person, but I think it's a bit silly to unanimously praise GMail. Google is a company like any other, and I hope this little incident reminds the Google fanboys of that. We need to be wary and responsible.
Note to M1-ers: a curt but otherwise insightful message is not "Flamebait" or "Troll".
Third party notifications will cause Google to loose money on their adsense revenue. Simply put, if i was in google's position I would do something similar. Coincidently, some sites, like mine, rely on adsense revenue in order to stay online/stay as a free service. Thankfully, adsense pays well enough by people visiting a site and clicking on a link that it is a viable solution if you have a target audience (like the stock market or whatever).
I've also heard rumors of people making $50/click off of adsense which is absurd! Hence, why Google wants every dime they can get!
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artlu.net
If I had to guess, I'd have to say this is the problem with unofficial notifiers.
Whenever a user logs on, their entire mail spool is loaded into memory for fast access (since hard drive access is so slow.) This is normally not a problem, since only a small percentage of users will be actively online at a time. However, when there is an email notifier logging on every five minutes checking for new emails, this creates increased server load for Google's servers. Google's Notifier doesn't have this problem, since it just waits for a packet to be sent out by Google.
That's my guess, anyway. I doubt they're doing it just to be annoying.
"Google has now taken it one step further and created a word-identification script filter as part of the login process." In fact if you go there now you won't see this. This is part of Gmail's anti bruteforcing stuff. If you get a password wrong so many times it starts requiring you to enter a word to try and stop an automated bruteforcing script. GMAIL ISN'T BLOCKING YOUR 3RD PARTY MAIL NOTIFIER JUST YOU FOR BEING STUPID!
How do they log into their gmail account?
This article appears to be nothing more than speculation on the part of some disgruntled third party app user who, for some reason beyond me, is annoyed that a *BETA* service is changing things up a bit. It doesn't even have a link to a real news story to back it up. Slashdot, you should be ashamed for approving this crap, it does nothing but tarnish your name.
Personally, I find Google's gmail notifier annoying since it sits in my taskbar and doesn't have popup notification
I use Google's official Gmail notifier and I like it alot better than the firefox extension I used to use. It does feature popup notification, so I don't know what they were referring to. The only difference is you dont have to have a browser open and you're not going to get in trouble for using it, which I think is a benefit.
People shouldn't be too quick to hack up their own solutions to something that is still in BETA.
There probably is very good reasons for them blocking it.
I have no doubts they will eventually have a developer API written for Gmail, like they do for other things on their site.
There's also damn good reasons to word verification filters -- brute force attacks.
Not if your e-mail is Google's property. Google has every right to do whatever they want with their property. Anybody stupid enough to use a so-called "free" e-mail provider for anything serious deserves what they get.
Maybe they're worried about Pop Goes the GMail, which provides a POP3 interface to a Gmail account. This is a real threat to them because if you use it you don't see any of the ads.
I'm sure he meant labels, but he's right. It doesn't tell when there's new mail in the labels, just the inbox. I submitted feedback about that to them. I suggest others do the same thing if it's something you'd like to see.
We all know Google has been deemed to be the best positioned company to compete with Microsoft. The big fear of course is that MS will use their desktop monopoly to blur the barrier between the offline and online worlds and make sure their offerings overtake Google in market share terms.
Now, take a look at these videos (http://msdn.microsoft.com/Longhorn/productinfo/co nceptvid/default.aspx) and you'll see that Longhorn will have this standard pop-up notification API that can be used by applications to inform the user of events. It is used prominently in these demos to show email reception.
Naturally, I would expect this to work with Exchange and possibly Hotmail (but what if Outlook/Outlook Express use it... See below), but not with Gmail.
Why is this important? Because if Gmail takes over the Web mail market, which could very well happen by 2006 given their good feature set and experience with applications at this scale, users will become accustomed to this functionality. Google will fiercely market the notifier applet to their users and everyone will have it, and they won't care less when the Longhorn applet can't notify them about new messages in their Gmail. And considering how many people I know who only have a Web mail account, I think this would allow Google to prevail by meshing and extending their user experience right into their desktops.
Then again, given that they're thinking of implementing POP access and that MS mail clients may as well use this feature, this may all be a moot point...
The revolution will not be televised.
I don't really get this rant. First of all, there's no word identification filter in the login process. Second, if he doesn't like gmail notifier, don't use it. Thirdly, I highly doubt the changes are solely to disturb the third party tools. More likely, they're working on improvents (which shouldn't come as a surprise since it's still in beta).
Maybe there are legitimate reasons for doing this. If Google fears that GMail's 1GB storage space could be used as a warez haven, they may have good reason for locking out automated tools.
The roots of education are bitter, but the fruit is sweet.
--Aristotle
Gmail has not published a offical api yet to access there webmail.
/. servers if everyone tried to post at the exact same time, They would slow to a crawl..
Right now these third party apps work by logging into the gmail account and pulling up the records, its just like you going to the webpage and logging in. This requires there system to access and cache every message in your inbox.
Imaging what would happen to the
This is what they are trying to prevent, thousands of third party checkers slowing down there system. I would be willing to bet once they have there gmail API stablized they will publish something like they have for the google search API, allowing third party programs to PROPERLY check the system without using excess resources.
Personal Website
Oh cool... so... let's extend that to music or other copyright material...
"Why is it that copyright holders don't like a third party to distribute their music. They're getting free publicity, it's no cost to them, and it makes your product more useful, for dog's sake!"
</sarcasm>
Ah, the conspiracy theories that fly around on slashdot.
Mathematics is made of 50 percent formulas, 50 percent proofs, and 50 percent imagination.
The original post is a troll. I just checked my google now. No word verification on it at all. I even logged out and logged back in again.
Yeah same here... I tried it on 3 browsers (cleaning out the history and cache on each one) to make sure.
- Gmail could offer a checkbox in the logon screen (a parameter to pass to the input form) that says in effect "show NEW email only".
- Alternatively, they could show the list of new emails along with the captcha, so that third-party notifiers would have the info they need without requiring the heavy load
- Google could publish an API for third-party notifiers to register the IP address:port pair to which the user wants a new mail notification to be sent, converting from a polling to message-based mechanism.
These would be good things to do with software during beta-testing...like now.[100% ISO 646 Compliant]
SVM, ERGO MONSTRO.
Will we be seeing controls on browsers that can view gmail next?
We have since the initial launch. Konqueror still doesn't work.
Has anyone considered the possibility that the reason they're blocking these notifiers isn't because they have a problem with the idea, but rather there isn't a standard upon which they've settled on?
What I mean is, Slashdot bans people when they abusively pull RSS feeds too often, and ask people to only pull RSS once every 30 minutes, and no more often than that. It's possible that these programs are pinging the crap out of the server, essentially DDOS'ing the sytem with mindless queries every few seconds to every few minutes. If the notifiers only queried once every half hour, there would be no issue, but hen people would find it useless since there would be up to a half hour delay on being notified of new mail.
I think therein lies the crux of the matter.
Karma: Chameleon (mostly due to the fact that you come and go).
Even if google incorporated word identification in their login (and they didn't), that wouldn't block third party email notifiers. Your email notifier has a person to use as a resource. You.
Your email notifier would just have to ask you to identify the word in the png every so often. Barely even inconvenient.
But they didn't do that anyway. Whatever.
There are no trails. There are no trees out here.
It's all about Google's Business model. They need to show you advertisments to help pay for the storage space, bandwidth, and development. They want you to log in and check your mail manually. Everytime an automated tool checks your mail for you they lose advertising potential and their stats of how many hits they get per second/hour/day are skewed. Being able to reliably tell their customers how many people are seeing their ads probably drove most of that.
Shouldn't I be free to use whatever third party software to check my email?
If you don't like their policies, they'll refund your money.
___
It's the end of my comment as I know it and I feel fine.
...and not a bunch of FUD, here is a legitimate reason for blocking 3rd party notifiers. If everyone is free to develop their own apps, they could run into similar problems as sites serving rss feeds. As it is now, any damn fool can write themself an aggregator, and as a result many do not work as they are supposed to. Instead of only checking for changes every hour or so, some allow the user to check for updates every minute. As a result of that, the aggregators end up forming a DDOS attack on the server hosting the feed. If Google controls the notifiers for gmail, they can ensure that they do not suffer similar problems.
Mathematics is made of 50 percent formulas, 50 percent proofs, and 50 percent imagination.
Yeah, not only is the Google Office Suite better and more stable than MS Office; the GoogleOS is finally ready for prime time
And this may as well be why Google actually represents more than a threat to Microsoft. It is not about the desktop operating system anymore; a new breed of software companies is out there using the Internet as their distribution channel. Google, Amazon, eBay, etc., are all software companies in disguise. Typically, you don't pay to use their software; advertisement and special services takes care of that. But still, you access their servers to use their software in order to get your information processed.
As broadband becomes ubiquitous, we should expect more and more innovative uses of the Internet (note I said the Internet, not necessarily the Web...) As for MS, how much more can they really grow? New machines cannot sustain their level of growth forever, and the users will not migrate to their next version of Windows or Office suite just because; they are now finding themselves diverting towards new initiatives and into new markets where they actually have to (gasp!) compete, lest they lose relevance in the larger scheme.
I don't see MS disappering anytime soon, but certainly it is not the good ol' times where they could just crush away their competition, and they are worried about that. Whether they have reason enough to be worried or not is up for debate, but just like with people, stress can be more harmful to companies that the actual situation they're stressing about.
Most of these ideas have been said before many times, and that includes several Slashdotters. You can go look for the posts yourself.
The revolution will not be televised.
Yes they do.
You need be in a message to see them.
Example: if the message has the word "IBM" in there, 3 or 4 ads for IBM RS6000 servers will show up on the right side, exactly like the sponsored links on Google.
Sponsored Links
IBM RS6000
Call Configsys for RS6000 systems Systems and parts available
www.configsys.com
Refurb RS/6000 Systems
Huge inventory, low pricing, custom configured & fast delivery
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IBM RS/6000 - pSeries
National IBM Distributors Wholesale - Free Tech Support
natdata.com
About these links
Nouvelles de jeux et technologies en français. TC
Rights are inherent to human existence. The US Bill of Rights is a way of saying what the government explicitly cannot do, as those restrictions were very important to the original founders. There were also many who did not want a Bill of Rights, for the reason that people (like you) would get stupid and think that the rights stated are the only ones you have. Like many people before you, you get the entire idea of rights completely wrong.
Where on earth did the author get the idea that:
A) That there IS a word logon system currently implemented.
B) That said word logon system was to block third party systems from interoperating with Google.
Finally, why was this put on Slashdot when there is absolutely no link to any article whatsoever to backup the few sentences that make up this story? Since when is some guy's short four sentence oppinion the ENTIRE story, without giving any examples whatsoever?
I made a post like a week ago in an mIRC scripting forum explaining how it can be done. (Even though my post is oriented towards mIRC scripting, it could very well be done in other scripting/programming languages).
I paste my post below for the sake of preventing a possible "minor slashdotting":
---------
...to locking out third party apps is to work with those making the apps.
Third party products likely cause excessive loads: ask people not to check their email too frequently (that's what Northwestern did when I was checking my mail every 5 minutes with Eudora) then ban belligerent accounts.
Assume that the offical gmail notifier creates less load per request than 3rd parties: open up your API and third party apps will use this too (it's probably easier to program anyway).
Loss of ad revenue: require third party apps to displace one ad everytime a pop up notification is displayed. This would be no more intrusive than the ads in gmail itself since you'd only see the ad when you do have email (which is consistent).
Gmail is still in beta: perhaps a lock-out is best until gmail is officially released. Then standards shouldn't change so google could be play "nice".
That said, Google can do whatever they want. You don't like it, find a better service.
Disclaimer: I don't have gmail and am relying on my intuition. If you think I should, send an invite to: jd0g85 at yahoo dot com
There is no belief, however foolish, that will not gather its faithful adherents who will defend it to the death.-Asimov
Shouldn't I be free to use whatever third party software to check my email?
It's called "don't use gmail if you don't like the terms".
Why the fuck does everyone think they can do whatever they want with things they choose to use? You don't like the way gmail works? Don't fucking use it you stupid wanker. Quit being a bitchy little cunt and go get a regular e-mail account for Christ's sake. It's not that fucking complicated.
Alito: A vote for Alito is a punch in the eye to put that bitch back in her place!
Google has now taken it one step further and created a word-identification script filter as part of the login process.
/. homepage.
This is true, if you consider mis-typing your password 5 times part of your normal "login process", otherwise, it still works like it always did, as the word identification script does not kick in until after you have mis-typed your password 5 times (seriously! go try!)
Personally, I find Google's gmail notifier annoying since it sits in my taskbar and doesn't have popup notification
Thats great and all except it DOES have pop up notification (not only does it popup, but you can right click the google icon on your tray and have it "tell you again")
Shouldn't I be free to use whatever third party software to check my email?
YES, you should be free to use whatever third party software to check YOUR (POP3/hosted/payed for) email. However, Google is also free to NOT allow you to do so with your free gmail account. There's nothing to argue about, if you don't like it, dont use it.
Will we be seeing controls on browsers that can view gmail next?
yes
Why was this article even posted to slashdot? There werent even links to outside sources (besides Gmail itself). This is just one guy writing up some stupid (wrong) comments, and it's on the freekin
What they really want is for third party clients to change the way they check for new messages.
Look, the original thing that they had offered no easy way for a client to check for messages. So they created the Gmail notifier. Along with it, they created a low bandwidth simple way to check for messages. The Gmail notifier doesn't actually check the HTML version of the page. It pulls something down that is much simpler and less bandwidth/CPU intensive on their end.
By breaking the old way of doing it, they're forcing these apps to change what they do in order to work. Most likely, these apps will *copy* what the gmail notifier program does to check mail. And that's likely fine with Google. Hurts them no more than if the person was using the real notifier, in that case.
- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
"Recently, Google's gmail service has attempted to change login protocols to block third-party gmail notifiers that alert you to new email."
So, the two million byte question is when will people accept the fact that Google is just as "evil" as half the other companies out there despite its professed black sheep good-guy policy? Right here, we have Google striving to lock 3rd parties out of its email client, something universally hated when it come to MSN and Yahoo IM's, while Google itself is happily absorbing as many 3rd party features into it's core service as possible ala Windows. Hell, Google is a quasi-dictionary now as well as advertising service and potentially an online store front for ecommerce in the near future. Even there IPO was rigged in order to put them in the best position possible by feeding off wildly speculatory and inflated stock... At least until they realized the market wasn't going to play that game.
Personally I have no problem with this. Business is business. But I'm just wondering when people will take the blinders off and realize Google is just another MSN, Yahoo or Windows, and not the cool counter e-culture phenomenom masses worship.
You need a FREE iPod Nano
You ban whatever IP is accessing too often, just like Slashdot does. The goal is to stop the people from abusing bandwith, not stop people using a particular program.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
to check my Gmail and then I found I was locked out of my account, and I tried the forgot password option and it told me I did not have a secondary email set (but I did, my Yahoo one).
I emailed Google's Gmail abuse address to ask them if my account was hijacked and if I can get back in, but they have not yet responded.
I had set my Yahoo Groups to send messages to my Gmail account. So I can better read and search the messages. Is this some sort of violation of the ToS, because if it is, I've missed that.
Google still has not contacted me back, and I find that very rude.
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
That's exactly why Patrick Henry, among others, was *opposed* to the Bill of Rights - because people like you would say it was a complete list of rights, rather than a list of minimal guaranteed rights among many other rights.
What it boils down to is that you have whatever rights you have the ability and willingness to demand. What _that_ generally boils down to is that you have whatever rights your culture grants you. It is a bad, bad move as a culture for us to decide people have some minimal set of rights that can be enumerated somewhere - instead, keep pushing the envelope of your rights until it includes everything that doesn't hurt someone else.
That said, I don't believe we have a right to force Google to make it easy for 3rd party mail notifiers to work. It did miff me until someone pointed out how their notifier could be much more efficient. I wouldn't be surprised to see them solidify the notifier API and make it a public release after they have tested it for a while.
"Shouldn't I be free to use whatever third party software to check my email?"
Sure. You're free to use any software you want. And Google is free to not allow you to use any software with their service that you don't want. And since you're not paying them anything, you don't have much leverage to get them to change their policy, do you?
It's a free service. Take it or leave it.
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
Gmail already does this. Try using opera to view your Gmail account. And no, Google is not doing this because Opera doesn't work with the site... If you use Opera and switch its user-agent line to IE or Nutscrape, Opera will be able to access your Gmail account just fine.
I'm not saying that Google doesn't have reasons for doing this.. maybe they do. But at this point in time they're actively stopping perfectly good "alternative" browsers from getting to your Gmail.
Would this be tolerated if it weren't Google? Would Microsoft get away with this?
/dev/random
Gmail is a service provided freely by Google. If they chose to disallow you from using something they do not want you to use with their service, that is their business. If you do not like that, you stop using that service or you follow what they want you to do.
It's that simple, folks.
Google's own Gmail Notifier does not work with Win98.. and that's what I have to run at home because of legacy apps. The FireFox notifier worked fine, until Google broke it. Beta or not, this ain't the way to win friends and influence people.
There is nothing wrong with yr Internet. Do not attempt to adjust the picture. We are controlling the transmission - NSA
Run your own mailserver at home and enjoy the 40/60/80/etc/GB of disk storage you have, and use whatever you like to access it (IMAP, POP3, Web).
Then convert your Gmail account into an archive, by making your client forward all mails to it. Easy to search for stuff you think you've missed, or deleted.